Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: Two members of an Upper Peninsula drug enforcement team have their quiet days rocked when a mysterious man who doesn’t speak English races across the border on a snowmobile filled with money and drugs.
About: This script finished on the Black List last year. Ben Bolea has made a short movie as well as a small feature film.
Writer: Ben Bolea
Details: 112 pages

Bring Jennifer Lawrence full circle back re: Winter’s Bone?

Yesterday, in the “What I Learned” section, I talked about a way you can make up for your low-budget movie ending by using setups and payoffs to make the ending feel bigger.

I think about that all the time. As writers, you can technically write anything. You can write a 200 million dollar movie if you want to. But the reality is, you probably need to start small and tell smaller stories. The reason for this is, when you’re an up-and-comer, the studios don’t trust you to write giant movies.

And because you’re writing a smaller movie, you’re starting with one hand tied behind your back, at least in how it relates to competing with the big Hollywood movies.

Therefore, I’m always looking for hacks to make your small movie feel just as big and important as a Marvel movie. Or a Fast and Furious movie. You’ll never compete with their set pieces. But there are ways to trick the reader/viewer into things feeling big even though they’re small.

For example, that movie Boiling Point just dropped on Netflix – it’s a movie about a restaurant kitchen in New York City. The movie takes place all in one night. That URGENCY makes this tiny story feel bigger than it is. So there’s another tip for you: URGENCY can make small movies feel bigger.

Another easy way to make a small movie feel bigger is what today’s script does – it covers drugs. Drugs, guns, murder: All three of those things are cheap to produce. You don’t need a lot of money to shoot a movie that has them. So it’s yet another hack you can use to compete with the big boys.

U.P.S.E.T. takes place in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. For those of you who don’t know, Michigan is a state that has this giant vertical shape. Then, above it, is a lake. Above that lake is a SECOND part of Michigan. That’s the Upper Peninsula, which borders Canada.

I like the use of the Upper Peninsula in this movie because I’m always looking for something new and fresh and this area of the country has never been written about before. The title, by the way, stands for a tiny drug force up there. It’s called U.P.S.E.T. and it stands for The Upper Peninsula Substance Enforcement Team.

Heading up this team are 30-somethings Janice and Glenn. But Janice has finally hit the big time and is moving down state to join the DEA. That night, the small force celebrates and Janice makes the mistake of sleeping with Glenn.

The next morning, right before Janice is about to leave, they get a call that there’s a mysterious group of people who are snowmobiling around up north. So Janice and Glenn head up there where they run into a Mexican man speeding across the frozen lake on his snowmobile.

The man, Fausto, crashes and passes out. When Janice and Glenn catch up to him, they find him with a bag containing a million dollars and a ton of fentanyl pills. They take him back to the station but when he wakes up, it doesn’t matter because he can’t speak English.

Janice feels it’s their duty to look into this further and that’s when they find out that this is a major drug operation happening just north of the border and it’s probably – as in DEFINITELY – above their pay grade. But ever the determined cop, Janice heads up to the rich guy’s home that the drugs were supposed to be delivered to to find out more.

From there, the REALLY BAD guys get involved, and now it’s almost certain Janice and Glenn are goners. But if that isn’t bad enough, it turns out Janice’s own boss is involved. Which means they have no help from the outside and no help from the inside. The only way they’re getting out of this is to pull a John Wick and shoot up everyone they see.

I liked the way this script started. Once again, I’m always looking for ANYTHING FRESH in a script. The more freshness you can provide to your script salad, the more eagerly I will chow down. So to start with a cop snowmobile chase was a cool opening! I don’t remember ever seeing a cop car snowmobile going after the bad guys. So I was in.

And when Janice and Glenn slept together, I thought that was a strong choice as well. One of the harder things to do in screenwriting is make the primary character relationships interesting. Most of the writers I encounter take those relationships for granted and barely pay attention to them.

But if you can make that primary relationship interesting in some way, it adds a layer to the story. The more of these layers you can add, the deeper your story plays. The fact that they’ve known each other for years and slept together for the first time last night and now they have to engage in their biggest case ever — that adds subtext to every single conversation they have.

To understand the advantage of that choice, imagine the story without it. Imagine these two as cops who have a normal working relationship. It’s not as interesting. This is why I liked Challengers. Everything we kept learning throughout the movie added more and more layers to the primary relationship (the two players) and that final match.

If you want to know the difference between the okay scripts and the really good ones, it’s the writers who pay attention to details. They really think about that main relationship. They really think about the internal conflict with the protagonist. They really think about how to construct the plot in unexpected and gripping ways.

I realize it’s hard to explain but the short of it is: I can tell when a writer’s put 100% in. I can tell. I can actually tell the EXACT percentage they put in. For instance, I can tell when a writer has given his script 60% of what he’s capable of. These are the scripts I hate reading because I don’t feel like the writer cared enough to put his heart and soul on the page.

Most scripts I read hover between 60-70% effort. I maybe read 4-5 scripts a year where I feel that the writer gave me everything they’ve got. So I’m just warning you, while most readers may not have this nerdy percentage marker in their minds that I have, every reader can tell when a writer isn’t giving their all.  You’re not fooling them.  Trust me.

I always like to remind writers of that because it’s one of the most controllable variables in screenwriting: effort.

This script I’d put around 80-85%. There’s tons of effort here. But I’m not sure that the story ever did anything exciting. These small-town crime scripts all kinda feel the same. It’s tough to do much new with them. That’s what holding this script back. You read it and you think, “I’ve read this script before.” Not this EXACT script – but ones similar to it.

It was solid.  Just never exceptional.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Add at least one layer to the primary relationship in your screenplay so that the scenes between those characters have an extra layer to them.  These two slept together. Glenn wants more out of the relationship than Janice does.  That ensures all of their conversations have an added layer of subtext!

Genre: Drama
Premise: Two aging tennis players who were once best friends play one final match under the watchful eye of the woman they both love.
About: The day has finally come. A tennis movie finished number 1 at the box office. Challengers beat the odds and topped the weekend with 15 million dollars. The writer is the husband of Celine Song, who recently wrote and directed the movie, Past Lives.
Writer: Justin Kuritzkes
Details: 131 minutes.

It’s been a while since I’ve gone to the theater so if there was a film that was going to get me there, it would have to be something personal, something I connected with on a deep level. And since I spent 15 years of my life chasing the dream of becoming a tennis champion, Challengers became that film.

Now, I’d already read the script, which you can check out my review of here. But it’d been long enough that I didn’t remember everything and could therefore go into the movie fresh.

So, did the movie live up to the script? Let’s find out.

For those who know nothing about the story, here’s a recap. 30-something tennis professionals Patrick and Art are playing in the final of a small professional tournament. We immediately learn that these two used to be best friends, but not anymore. Whereas Art has gone on to win several Grand Slam tournaments, Patrick is barely holding on to his 150 world ranking.

We cut back to the two in their teens when they used to be doubles partners. It’s there where they meet the young beautiful phenom, Tashi. The two corral Tashi into hanging out after a tournament and the three become fast friends (with tons of sexual tension). Tashi likes the more dangerous Patrick at first. But, over the years, as the flashbacks continue, she moves over to the safe (and more successful) Art, who she eventually marries.

After a career-ending injury, Tashi becomes Art’s coach and is one of the primary reasons he wins so many tournaments. But the truth is, Tashi hates her husband. She still pines for Patrick. But the problem is, she hates him too. Tashi believes that if her husband can beat Patrick in this final, he could win one last grand slam. But there’s a problem. Art has never beaten Patrick. And Patrick wants to keep it that way.

*****INSIDE NERDY TENNIS RANT BEGINS HERE*****

If you want to fast-forward to my thoughts on the actual characters, plot, and story, I’ve denoted below where this rant ends. But I cannot, in good conscience, not comment on the tennis in the movie. So let’s go at it.

My first thought when I saw the actors playing was: They look better than I expected. Their strokes were clean. Their form was good. You can always tell a good tennis player because they extend their racket out through the ball as far as their body will allow them. Amateur players have shorter hackier swings. So they obviously had some good coaching to teach them how to swing correctly.

When Elad and I were discussing how to make the actors in Court 17 look like tennis players, we realized that the only way we could possibly accomplish this was by inserting the actors’ heads on the bodies of real professional players via digital replacement. Cause we both agreed that, even in the best case scenario, where we’d get Ryan Gosling to play the lead (the lead was originally a man), we couldn’t make him look like 1/10th of a professional player even if we coached him 4 hours a day for six months.

So I was impressed by the fact that all three actors in Challengers, for the most part, swung the racket well. I was particularly impressed by Zendaya’s footwork. A tennis player’s footwork is a series of short quick intense bursts. It’s so fast. And her footwork was shockingly good.

But I quickly noticed what I feared going into the movie. Which is that they weren’t using real tennis balls. Instead, they had the actors run around and swing their rackets at imaginary balls then added the balls in digitally later. From a filming perspective, I know why they did this.

When teaching tennis, one of the things you do is you stand next to the player and take them through the tennis stroke. You show them the beginning (racket back), middle (extend out through the ball), and end (follow through). If you do this enough times with the student, you can make their swing look pretty close to a professional swing.

However, the second – AND I MEAN THE SECOND – you introduce a ball into the equation, THEIR ENTIRE SWING FALLS APART. And I’m not talking just a little bit. I’m talking, imagine a deer gliding through the forest. Now imagine a three-legged pig stumbling through that same forest, bouncing off trees and rolling around half the time. That’s the equivalent of a student swing without and with a ball. That’s because, once a ball is introduced, all the student cares about is hitting the ball. They don’t care about the swing anymore.

This is why they did it this way in Challengers. If you’re not going to use body doubles, you have to have them swinging at nothing. Cause once they start swinging at real balls, they’ll look like hacks.

But here’s why not having actual balls when filming hurts the tennis. If you watch
Zendaya swing in this movie, she does something NO PROFESSIONAL PLAYER WOULD EVER DO. Which is she NEVER LOOKS AT THE BALL. She just swings while staring forward.

Note where Federer’s eyes are at contact point.

It looks bizarre to real tennis players because you can’t hit a ball you’re not looking at. And the whole reason she’s not looking at the ball IS BECAUSE THERE NEVER WAS A BALL. They just told the players to run and swing at nothing.

Zendaya contact point.

This issue was so distracting, I couldn’t stop thinking about it while I was watching the film. I kept imagining calling Luca Guadagnino and explaining to him this mistake and how he should’ve done more test footage and had real tennis players watch it so they could’ve pointed it out and corrected it. But, eventually, once I accepted that I was never going to have this conversation, I moved on and just focused on the movie.

*****INSIDE NERDY TENNIS RANT ENDS*****

Okay, let’s chat about the actual film. I had the exact same experience with the movie as I did the screenplay. I didn’t like the first hour of the movie. For starters, it was extremely homoerotic for no other reason than the whims of the director. At times I thought I was at the STUDS theater on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.

I wasn’t interested in the main match either. I didn’t understand why I should care about two old friends trying to win this tiny tennis tournament.

But what the movie does really well (and the script did the same thing) is it uses its flashbacks to give the viewer more information about the characters. And that information always relates back to the match being played in the present.

So, for example, in one flashback, we might find out that Patrick slept with Tashi at a tournament two years ago. Therefore, when we come back to the present-day match we see the points a little differently. There’s added subtext to the battle. Or (small spoiler), in another flashback, Tashi asks Patrick to throw the match. So when we jump to the game, we have THAT extra detail in our head. Is Patrick going to throw the match or isn’t he?

One of the things that annoys me so much about flashbacks in screenplays is that they take more than they give. They stop all story momentum to go backwards. You are TAKING from the reader whenever you do that. Sure, flashbacks often give us details about the characters but the details are never interesting enough to warrant stopping the main story for.

Challengers shows you how to do it right. Every flashback gives us RELEVANT information about the characters that CHANGES THE WAY we experience their finals match. That part of the script works so well that by the time we get to the end of the movie, I was on pins and needles. I had no idea who was going to win and I wanted to know.

This movie is so strange. It has so many quirks, so many times, early on, where it isn’t working. But somehow it manages to overcome all its weaknesses to put it together at the end. And I think its success is due to one single word. STAKES.

This movie is all about stakes. There are no stakes at the beginning. We don’t care about the match. But the more we learn about the characters, the more we learn that this match means EVERYTHING to each of these players. This script really reminded me about the power of beefing up the big events in your story by adding to the “all or nothing” recipe of that event. The more that’s riding on that battle, the more the reader cares. So for that reason, I think this movie’s worth checking out. As long as you’re prepared for churro-penis metaphors, you’re going to love it.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: The importance of setups and payoffs in your climax. So, in big Hollywood movie climaxes, they keep the audience’s attention with spectacle. But in drama, you have to be more clever because you don’t have spectacle. The best way to make up for that is with a killer PAYOFF to a SETUP you used earlier in the movie. So here, in Challengers, there’s a scene when they’re teenagers and they’re playing and they’re joking around about if Patrick slept with Tashi or not. And Art says, “If you slept with her, put the ball right on the throat of your racket when you serve. If not, use your regular service motion.” And they build the suspense of Patrick prepping to serve. Finally, right before he serves, he puts the ball on the racket confirming that he slept with her and they both have a laugh about it. — Cut to 20 years later, the night before the finals match, and (big spoiler) Patrick has sex with Tashi. Then, the next day in the final match, in the third set, the score is tied. Patrick goes up to serve and… as Art is preparing to return… Patrick moves the ball to the throat of his racket (conveying that he just slept with Art’s wife). It’s a well done payoff that hits with the impact of Thor’s hammer. And that’s it. That’s all you need to do in your low-budget movie climax to compete with the big boys who have all that spectacle money.

It’s finally here!

Movie Tagline Showdown

It ain’t just loglines anymore!

If you’ve never participated in a Logline Showdown, this is how they work.  You read the five entries down below, decide which one you like best, then vote for it in the comments section.  We love to hear why you liked (or disliked) an entry.  So, if you have time, let us know why you chose your winner.

You’re probably wondering how the addition of a movie tagline affects things.  Look, you vote however you want .  If you love a logline, vote for that entry.  If you love a tagline, vote for that entry.  Ultimately, I’d like to find the best script and the logline will be a better indicator of that.  But you do you!  I’m not going to tell you how to vote.

Oh, and enough with the protests! Just vote. This is the opportunity for someone to get some publicity for their script. You could help them do that. But not if you don’t vote.

All right, it’s time for this month’s entries.  Good luck, everyone!

Title: Beckys
Genre: Comedy
Logline: After waking up from a six-year-long coma, Becky Schaffer is horrified to learn her late husband has used her exact physical likeness to create the #1 selling humanoid personal assistant – basically, an Alexa that can carry your groceries for you. Now, Becky will have to learn how to survive in a world with 5 million versions of herself.

Tagline: How do you stand out in a crowd when your face is the crowd?

Title: Final Girl Kills
Genre: Horror
Logline: Famous for her many roles in slasher films, a young actress takes a break from acting to attend university, but when students bearing her characters’ names start turning up dead, she must find and stop the killer before she becomes a real-life “final girl.”

Tagline: A killer has taken their love of final girls one stab too far.

Title: Fragments of Blackstone
Genre: Mystery
Logline: A man wakes up in the wreckage of a plane crash on the outskirts of small town Wyoming with no memory of who he is or how he got there.  When he’s brought into town, he’s recognized for being the sheriff’s son who’s been missing for twenty years and wanted for double homicide.

Tagline: How do you defend yourself against a crime you don’t know if you committed?

Title: Devil in Transit
Genre: Supernatural Thriller
Logline: A wanted criminal and a recovering addict are forced to smuggle a possessed fifteen year old girl across the Mexican border to a supernatural holding facility in the United States before her terrifying power is unleashed.

Tagline: And Hell followed with her…

Title: My Sister and I
Genre: Thriller/Horror
Logline: Two teenage sisters both raised in solitude in the Scottish Highland Wilderness by their psychopathic, survivalist father begin to question his cruel and unorthodox ways and plot their escape from his evil clutches after finding the remains of a young woman, who could be their estranged mother, hidden underneath their secluded farmhouse.

Tagline: Just yous wait til’ your da gets home.

There will be no Thursday article but MAKE SURE TO SUBMIT FOR LOGLINE SHOWDOWN! Entries are due Thursday by 10pm Pacific Time! I’ll post the five winning contestants at 12:01am Friday.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A high-end courier has three hours to transport a liver from LAX to a Santa Barbara hospital to a dying seven-year-old girl with the rarest blood type on the planet while contending with the head of the Southland’s most dangerous crime syndicate, who needs the organ to survive.
About: I believe these are the writers who wrote “The Shave,” that thriller script from a previous Black List. The thing is, I know I reviewed that script but I can’t find the review. So I can’t be sure. If these are the same writers, then they’re good! Cause I thought that script, which was a thriller about a guy getting a shave (I know!) was fun.
Writers: Tommy White & Miles Hubley
Details: 105 pages

We are going OLD SCHOOL Scriptshadow today.

Say it with me now.

G.

S.

U.

Look, there are many ways to tell a story but when it comes to cinema, the way that best jostles the DNA cinema matrix is to give us a strong character, and give that character a GOAL, some HIGH STAKES, and some EXTREME URGENCY.

Disagree with me?

Well, you’re wrong. Wrong according to who? According to obviousness.

How GSU is this script? It doesn’t even start with FADE IN. It starts with LET’S GO. No, I’m serious!

Hank Malone, 40, is that actor on Reacher. At least that’s who I’m imagining. He’s giant and huge and big and strong and aggressively agitated. Hank is kinda like a fixer. He works for suspect people and takes care of a lot of ‘criminal adjacent’ problems (politicians who need clean up after a big orgy, rich old men who need their exotic birds transferred to their angry ex-wives). But the guy doesn’t kill anyone. He’s your friendly neighborhood ex-SEAL fixer.

Hank then gets a call from his handler, Izzy, to grab a liver from LAX and deliver it to Santa Barbara, about 90 minutes away, where the weather is preventing any planes from landing. That liver needs to get to Santa Barbara within 2 hours or a little girl, Ellie, 7, will die. This is a rare liver blood enzyme type (or something) that only comes around once in a decade. So this is this girl’s only chance.

When Hank gets to the airport, he’s met by Ben, who’s carrying the liver. Ben chats him up as he walks along until Hank finally asks him, “Yo, are you going to give me the liver or not??” Ben says, “Oh, no. I *am* the delivery. I’m the medical courier.” Hank is delivering the deliverer. This is something Hank was not told so he’s already pissed.

But he’s going to get more pissed – don’t worry. Half an hour into their trip, Hank spots an SUV trailing them. Hank’s spidey sense starts tingling and he calls Izzy. What’s going on, dude? Why do I have company? Izzy starts sounding all suspicious and it’s then when we realize Izzy’s under the control of someone else. SOMEONE ELSE WHO NEEDS THAT LIVER. A bad bad criminal man named Damien Gallow.

Damien hops on the phone and says, “Yo, all you have to do right now is stop the car, let us have the liver, and we’re gone. Or…… I kill Izzy.” Hank does about five decades worth of introspection in 10 seconds and decides that he’d rather help a little girl live than whoever this asshole needs the liver for. So Damien delivers on his promise and kills Izzy.

It turns out that Damien’s mom is some psycho crime boss named Donna who ALSO needs that liver in order to live. So Damien’s not going to go quietly into the night just because Hank decided he had a heart. Oh no. Damien is going to get that liver at all costs – Hank and Ben just don’t know it yet.

Runner is an odd duck of a GSU showcase.

Its first 30 pages are spectacular. The way it sets up Hank and the rest of the characters – I got a strong sense of who everyone was. And then it’s written in this fast-paced kinetic style, yet it never skimps too much on detail, preventing it from ever feeling thin.

There’s this scene around page 35 where Hank and Ben are pulled over by these bad guys. The scene just sits there in its suspense, soaking the silence up, as we wait for the bad guys to move. What are they going to do? That was the peak of the screenplay for me. The story AND the writing were firing on all cylinders.

Where things started to sputter was with Ben. I have no idea what this character was doing in the movie! He’s just there to hang around and talk to Hank. It’s very frustrating because the deeper into the script I went, the more I kept waiting for SOMETHING to happen that would indicate why Ben needed to be here. When nothing arrived, I thought for sure Ben was going to be a late 3rd act bad-guy twist. But no. Nothing. He’s literally just there to hold the liver.

I think I understand what the writers were doing. They thought, “If we have Hank in the car alone, there’s no dialogue. So we have to have someone there for exposition and to introduce important plot beats.” But that’s not how screenwriting works. You can’t just put a character in your script ONLY to provide an expository function. He needs to be his own character. He needs to justify his own existence. He needs to have a storyline of his own.

That’s another area where I felt the script could’ve improved. There’s this early moment where Hank and Ben are driving and Hank’s talking to Izzy on the phone and Izzy’s acting confused about why Ben is there and I thought, “Hmm, wait, is Ben bad?” And then I thought, “How cool would it be if Ben is the wrong guy and he’s taking him in some completely opposite direction?” It felt like a situation was brewing where Hank couldn’t trust anyone and every 15 pages of the story was going to have a surprise reveal. But after that initial, “Bad guys are after us” moment, the script didn’t have any huge twists, which was a missed opportunity.

In the continued spirit of assessing dialogue this month, we get an example of Tip 137 from my dialogue book, which is, “Have one person who wants to talk and another who doesn’t.” That resistance creates conflict within the conversation and conflict is one of the major keys to writing good dialogue.

By the way, one last point here about this script because it relates to problems I’m seeing in a lot of the scripts I’ve been consulting on lately: If you have a character like Hank, who’s grumpy and tough and negative – traits that commonly lead to an unlikable character – do what these guys did at the start of their script.

They send Hank out a montage of his daily activities – which amounts to the errands he does daily in his job. One of them includes taking an exotic bird from one person to another. So you have this huge Jack Reacher thug walking around with a cage that has a rare bird inside. The ridiculousness of that image (and that job) makes him easy to cozy up to. We kinda like this guy now because of all the silliness he has to deal with every day.

It’s taking a page out of Rocky’s book when he has to go collect money from that guy and he ends up being nice to him. These are small things in screenwriting but they have a big impact. Character likability is REALLY IMPORTANT, especially when you’re dealing with an inherently cold or mean protagonist. So you have to figure out little ways for us to connect with them.

Overall, I thought this script was good, not great. But it will definitely finish Top 15 on my 2023 Black List re-rankings.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Backboard characters (characters whose only purpose is to give the main character someone to talk out loud to – like hitting a ball against a backboard), are inherently thin.  When producers complain about one-dimensional characters, this is one of the varieties they’re talking about.  Never create characters JUST for expositional purposes or just to give your hero someone to talk out loud to. Once you create a character (in this case, “Ben”), regardless of their function in the script, you must give them a purpose for being in the story and some sort of arc over the course of the script if you can.

Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!

I’m going to try and get a review up today but I’m short on time. I HAVE read the script. It’s called Runner and it was pretty darned good. In the meantime, though, I want you to get your entry in for April Logline Showdown (“Tagline” Edition).

I need your title, genre, logline, and also your *movie tagline*. Some notable movie taglines from the past…

“Just because you’re invited, doesn’t mean you’re welcome.” -Get Out

“Don’t believe the fairy tale.” – Maleficent

“His story will touch you, even though he can’t.” -Edward Scissorhands

“One dream. Four Jamaicans. Twenty below zero.” -Cool Runnings

What: Tagline Showdown
I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and Movie Tagline
Competition Date: Friday, April 26th
Deadline: Thursday, April 25th, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com